What is contemplative computing?

Contemplative computing may sound like an oxymoron, but it's really quite simple. It's about how to use information technologies and social media so they're not endlessly distracting and demanding, but instead help us be more mindful, focused and creative.

About Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

I write about people, technology, and the worlds they make.

My book on contemplative computing, The Distraction Addiction, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. (It's been translated into Dutch (as Verslaafd aan afleiding) and Spanish (as Enamorados de la Distracción); Russian, Chinese and Korean translations are in the works.)

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.

One of the things you always, and I mean always, hear about Internet of Things and smart home devices is that they “just work.” They’re all like these magic autonomous robots that’ll connect themselves to your wifi, then go do their thing, yet also be totally unobtrusive and intuitive (whatever those two words mean). Sounds cool, right?

Of course, the reality is very different, as this essay from IoS explains. The light went on sometime around the point when the author’s Internet-enabled thermostat stopped working whenever the wifi connection was lost (and “The only way to control the gadget is via the app, so when it breaks you’re really screwed"), and it came time to update their Philips Hue light bulbs: “When the first firmware update rolled around, it was exciting, until I spent an hour trying to update lightbulbs. Nobody warned me that being an adult would mean wasting my waking hours updating Linux on a set of lightbulbs, rebooting them until they’d take the latest firmware. The future is great."

In other words, things work great until they don’t, at which point all the wheels come off. Further, as we’ve learned recently, connected devices are “connected” to the fates of their companies, in a way that “dumb” devices are not. If the company that made your hammer or pants goes belly-up, that doesn’t affect your ability to pound nails or cover up your naughty bits. But that’s not the case with smart home devices.

A one-time purchase of a smart device isn’t a sustainable plan for companies that need to run servers to support those devices. Not only are you buying into a smart device that might not turn out to be as smart as you thought, it’s possible it’ll just stop working in two years or so when the company goes under or gets acquired.

The Internet of Things right now is a mess. It’s being built by scrappy startups with delusions of grandeur, but no backup plan for when connectivity fails, or consideration for if their business models reach out more than a year or two — leaving you and me at risk.

Just another indicator of how technologies of the future could turn out to be really distracting.

Georgia State University researcher Susan Snyder is studying the impact of Internet addiction (or PIU, Problematic Internet Use, described as >25 hours/week of non-school or -work use) on family ties. A new article finds that

College students who are addicted to the Internet report positive and negative effects on their family relationships….

On the plus side, these students reported their time on the Internet often improved family connectedness when they and their family were apart. However, their excessive Internet use led to increased family conflict and disconnectedness when family members were all together. And most students with PIU felt their families also overused the Internet, with parents not setting enough limits for either parent or sibling Internet use.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but until I read more, I’ll have to file this under what my mentor Riki Kuklick described as “the power of the social sciences” studies— things like detailed statistical studies of tax records that showed that— TAA-DAA!!!— incomes rose during the Industrial Revolution.

Part of me is also not sure classifying non-work and non-school use as unproblematic, but I’m not sure why.

As “classic” spam has declined, it’s become clear that the internet in general – indeed, life in general – has become an awful lot spammier. Partly, this is simply because spammers have found ways to spam that don’t involve email, using texts, Twitter, Gchat and so on. But there’s a deeper point here, too....

If spamming is about abusing the resource of other people’s attention, the ethos of spam is everywhere: in clickbait headlines that promise far more than they deliver; in tweets that exploit the “curiosity gap” by tantalizingly omitting key information; in the daily email I now receive... from a clothing store where I once bought one shirt.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about how to keep your Apple Watch from distracting you. Some of the recommendations are similar to the ones I made in my mindful iPhone posts: use the VIP feature to make whitelists, turn off most notifications, delete useless or interruption-generating apps. Though ultimately, Joanna Stern says,

As angry as I’ve wanted to be at the Apple Watch for interrupting my life, it’s on me to limit its distractions. As technology becomes an extension of our bodies, we need to find our own controls; we need to resist burying ourselves in the digital world and stay present in the real one.

And no, I’m not getting an Apple Watch. Not only do I have an older, pre-Bluetooth 4.0 phone, but I’ve thrown my lot in with a Seiko dive watch (with Nato strap, natch).

At least they do in India, and it’s a particular problem in the city of Varanasi, which has been trying to upgrade its IT services and introduce street-level wifi throughout the city— but the macaques that live in and around the city’s many temples keep chewing through the fiber optic cables:

Varanasi is also home to hundreds of macaque monkeys that live in its temples and are fed and venerated by devotees.

But the monkeys also feast on the fibre-optic cables that are strung along the banks of the Ganges river.

"We cannot move the temples from here. We cannot modify anything here, everything is built up. The monkeys, they destroy all the wires and eat all the wires," said communications engineer A.P. Srivastava.

Srivastava, who oversees the expansion of new connections in the local district, said his team had to replace the riverside cables when the monkeys chewed them up less than two months after they were installed.

He said his team is now looking for alternatives, but there are few to be found. The city of over 2 million people is impossibly crowded and laying underground cable is out of the question. Chasing away or trapping the monkeys will outrage residents and temple-goers.

Of all the animals in the whole world, almost all of our animal damage comes from this furry little nut eater. Squirrel chews account for a whopping 17% of our damages so far this year! But let me add that it is down from 28% just last year and it continues to decrease since we added cable guards to our plant. Honestly, I don’t understand what the big attraction is or why they feel compelled to gnaw through cables. Our guys in the field have given this some thought and jokingly suspect the cable manufacturers of using peanut oil in the sheathing.

Now there are car wires that apparently will be eaten by squirrels because they use delicious meant oil lubricant, but I don’t know if fiber optic really uses it too.

Asian countries are the world's leading producers, and some of the most avid consumers, of electronics. So it's no surprise that kids in China, Korea, and Taiwan spend lots of time online and gaming-- or that parents and the government worry about excessive screen time.

According to the Straits Times, the Taiwanese government has expanded the Protection of Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act. which previously banned "smoking, drinking, chewing betel nut and using drugs" among minors, to include Internet and computer use.

Parents may now be fined up to NT$50,000 (about US$2000) if they allow children to "constantly use electronic products for a period of time that is not reasonable." However, it's not clear what counts as "unreasonable."

My Italian collaborator Dario Villa (I swear I’ll send back the revisions for the Italian version of the book in a couple days, Dario!) points me to this great short animation by London-based illustrator Yukai Da:

‘Way out’, my MA graduation film, is inspired by ‘Alone Together’ by Sherry Turkle and a reflection of modern life in this digital age. The exaggerated contrast between emotionless citizens and characterized phones reveals our over‐dependence on virtual communication. A dramatic and extreme consequence shows a negative attitude, for which no one can escape the trend of technology that originally comes from the endless appetence of human beings.

AppDetox helps you to calm down your mobile app usage, and take a digital detox. You are able to set your own rules for your app usage to detox from some heavy app usage and stop procrastinating. According to your own rules the use of some apps will be forbidden. You will see temptations when you tried to launch an app against your rules in a log.

Looks like it has an interesting range of options: not only can you schedule apps to stay away from on certain days or the week or times of day, you can set a number of launches, or set a maximum usage time per day.

Perhaps an odd question to ask in an age of Grindr and Tinder, but still: this morning's KQED Forumtook it on. Presumably the audio will be online in a while (it's not yet), but one thing struck me about the conversation.

One of the guests, and a couple of the callers, made the argument that smartphones are simply tools, or media like books, and thus pose no special challenge that we haven't already seen before. The argument that technologies are merely tools that are neither good nor bad perhaps was once true, and continues to be true for some technologies. But I think it's not not the case for the technologies discussed here.

One of the speakers drew a parallel between smartphones and sharp knives, and argued that both can be useful or dangerous. I'd argue that smartphones are like knives that have end-user license agreements that say that we agree to share information about our use with KnifeCo, and sensors that monitor how we’re using the knives and what we're cooking, and then shares that information with supermarkets and kitchen supply stores so they can send us targeted advertisement-- or perhaps shares the data with insurance companies, who can adjust our premiums depending on how we use the knife.

Further, if they're knives, smartphones are more like badly-balanced, dull knives-- that is, they're designed to make it easy for you to cut yourself.

Years ago Langdon Winner wrote an article "Do Artifacts Have Politics," that was a reply to the "technologies are merely tools" claim. He argued that artifacts could reflect the politics and social assumptions of their creators. Networked devices not only reflect those politics, but have the ability to enact and update those politics in a way that more inert technologies did not.

I've recently been talking to people in locations as far-flung as Finland and Australia about designing programs that support mindfulness and flow, so I suspect there'll be a very diverse set of submissions to the Happiness Apps Challenge:

The Happiness Apps Challenge is an international App building challenge that is aimed to inspire minds in tech and design to create products that will increase world’s happiness quotient!

Create an App to make people happy. One positive person can spread Happiness to more than 1,000 people, but through the power of technology we can reach out to millions.

You have until December 24 to enter. (Check out the some of the ideas for entries.) It'll be very interesting to see how this unfolds.

Because I break it down in this Health magazine article. Basically, the advice (drawn from my book) comes down to this: it’s fine to weave social media into your life, but don’t let it warp your life.

I thought the article was going to be me and a bunch of other people, but it turns out mainly to be drawn from a series of emails with a Health writer. Which is fine, and it illustrates something I’m learning as I become more of a talking head: you just never really know what shape an article you’re quoted in is going to take. You have to just do your best to say things that are true, that don’t sound stupid on the page, and that are memorable.

And I love that they illustrate it with a picture of a woman taking a picture of her dog with her iPhone:

It didn’t come up in the interview, but I take a lot of pictures of my dogs with my iPhone:

will subtly redefine ownership as we know it. You will no longer own many of the most expensive and sophisticated items you possess. You may think you own them. But you’ll be wrong.

They say “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” but even if you physically and legally own a Smart Thing, you won’t actually control it. Ownership will become a three-legged stool: who physically owns a thing; who legally owns it; …and who has the ultimate power to command it. Who, in short, has root.

It feels a bit like Uber for your house, though that’s imperfect. What I mean is that Uber doesn’t actually have any employees or own any cars, but still wields plenty of control over drivers and destructive power over cab companies. Evans imagines a future in which you’re still buying and paying for things, lodging them in your house, and using them, but no longer having total control over them. These objects can report on you; there may be rules about how they’re used; they could still be in communication with, and responsive to, their makers; and there’s the chance that they’ll act not in your interests, but the interests of the companies that control them.

This is very interesting: a team at the University of Minnesota led by Bin He, a professor of biomedical engineering, has conducted a study measuring the ability of people who have practice “Mind-Body Awareness Training” (that’s meditation or yoga to you and me) to learn how to use brain computer interfaces— technologies where you do things like move a mouse across a screen using brain waves.

Years ago, He was conducting BCI research and noticed “one woman participant” who practiced meditation and yoga, and "was much more successful than other participants at controlling the computer with her brain.” This study measures whether there's a systematic, measurable difference in BCI learning and control ability between a group of 12 people who’ve meditated or done yoga regularly for at least a year, and 24 people who have not.

The participants were asked to move a computer cursor across the screen by imaging left or right hand movements.

The participants with yoga or meditation experience were twice as likely to complete the brain-computer interface task by the end of 30 trials and learned three times faster than their counterparts for the left-right cursor movement experiments.

As He puts it,

In recent years, there has been a lot of attention on improving the computer side of the brain-computer interface but very little attention to the brain side. This comprehensive study shows for the first time that looking closer at the brain side may provide a valuable tool for reducing obstacles for brain-computer interface success in early stages.

To me this isn’t a particularly surprising result, and it’s a nice little anticipation of how our present, which so often puts computers and attention at odds, may be an historical anomaly. In a world in which we’re controlling devices with our brains, concentration becomes essential: introducing distractions becomes a lot tricker and fraught, and it may also become harder to divert a user’s attention.

Instead of being a skill to deal with the problems created by poorly-design technologies or weapons of mass distraction, contemplative practices could be important as tools to enable better use of tomorrow’s technologies.

Yesterday I had a piece in Slate that talks about robot butlers, human butlers, and the work that butlers actually do— and how different it is from the work that robot butlers claim to be able to automate. Today I read about Alfred, a Boston area startup that is a “service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services.” Let’s pretend that means something.

Apparently, it sends people (who is calls Alfreds) around to your house once a week to pick up your dry-cleaning, unpack your Dollar Shave Club box, etc.

But once again, while it invokes the word “butler” to describe these people, the service provides but a fraction of what butlers do. It’s a classic example of what Jaron Lanier talked about: the first step to replacing people with machines is to redefine the work people do, in order to make it looks more algorithmic.

Still, it’s kind of amazing to hear someone say a “service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services,” and have it work as a magical spell that unlocks money.

This new article in Computers in Human Behavior is really interesting. A research team led by Patricia Greenfield wanted to know "whether increasing opportunities for face-to-face interaction while eliminating the use of screen-based media and communication tools improved nonverbal emotion–cue recognition in preteens.” So they set up this experiment:

Fifty-one preteens [specifically, 6th graders] spent five days at an overnight nature camp where television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed; this group was compared with school-based matched controls (n = 54) that retained usual media practices. Both groups took pre- and post-tests that required participants to infer emotional states from photographs of facial expressions and videotaped scenes with verbal cues removed. Change scores for the two groups were compared using gender, ethnicity, media use, and age as covariates.

What did they find?

After five days interacting face-to-face without the use of any screen-based media, preteens’ recognition of nonverbal emotion cues improved significantly more than that of the control group for both facial expressions and videotaped scenes. Implications are that the short-term effects of increased opportunities for social interaction, combined with time away from screen-based media and digital communication tools, improves a preteen’s understanding of nonverbal emotional cues.

Now, the good news in this study is that while lots of screen time may inhibit kids’ ability to read nonverbal emotional cues, they can get this skill back. The kids in both groups were pretty similar going in, but the group that spent the week at camp (specifically a place called the Pali Institute) became more skillful at reading the cues.

So when publications like Quartz report on the study by declaring that “Psychologists say overly connected children can’t read human emotion,” they’re not exactly incorrect (well, actually they are— “can’t read human emotion” is a strong version of the article’s claim), but they emphasize a negative “technology destroys our humanity” angle rather than a “people can get back their abilities” angle.

Nearly three decades after Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper publisher revolutionised the industry by moving to Wapping and ending the “hot metal” era, his flagship title has reintroduced the distinctive sound of old Fleet Street.

To the surprise of Times journalists, a tall speaker on a stand has been erected in the newsroom to pump out typewriter sounds, to increase energy levels and help reporters to hit deadlines. The audio begins with the gentle patter of a single typewriter and slowly builds to a crescendo, with the keys of ranks of machines hammering down as the paper’s print edition is due to go to press….

The introduction of the typewriter speaker was “a playful idea”, said Lucia Adams, deputy head of digital for The Times and Sunday Times. “Technology has always been an important part of what The Times has done and the typewriter might be an old technology but it’s still a technology.”

Psychiatrists in Singapore are pushing for medical authorities to formally recognise addiction to the Internet and digital devices as a disorder, joining other countries around the world in addressing a growing problem.

Singapore and Hong Kong top an Asia-Pacific region that boasts some of the world's highest smartphone penetration rates, according to a 2013 report by media monitoring firm Nielsen.

Some 87 percent of Singapore's 5.4 million population own smartphones as Internet-capable phones with cameras are popularly known….

Tan Hwee Sim, a consultant psychiatrist at The Resilienz Mind clinic in Singapore, noted that the symptoms exhibited by her young adult patients have changed over the years.

Obsession with online gaming was the main manifestation in the past, but addiction to social media and video downloading are now on the uptrend.

"Internet addiction as a disorder is not even listed in our latest psychiatric manual, it's only listed in the appendix as a disorder that requires further study," she said.

In terms of physical symptoms, more people are reporting "text neck" or "iNeck" pain, according to Tan Kian Hian, a consultant at the anaesthesiology department of Singapore General Hospital.

"It is a commonly observed phenomenon that many people have their heads lowered and are now using their mobile devices constantly on the go, while queuing or even crossing the roads," Tan told AFP.

Earth Island Journal editor Jason Mark has a piece in The Atlantic about proposals to make wifi available in national parks and other remote areas, and whether a wired wilderness would be the same place. As "a lover of wild places,” he confesses, "I can’t help but feel a little freaked out by the whole thing."

Wifi in the woods? I think I’ll pass. Because if we ever succeed in knitting all (or even most) of the physical world into the Internet, we could end up abolishing the sense of the Away. When we’re all able to connect from anywhere—well, then, there’ll be no place left to hide.

And Mark makes an important point about the difference between technologies that help you get closer to nature, by extending your ability to survive in the woods, and those that threaten to distract you from it:

I like my lightweight, water-resistant space fabrics. I like my high-altitude stove and my sleeping bag and my water filter. Most of the Pacific Crest Trail Thru-Hikers I’ve come across in the Sierra Nevada the past couple of summers are fully GPS-equipped; forget this Cheryl Strayed getting lost bullshit. Modern gear and gizmos make backpacking—if not exactly comfortable—at least bearable.

But there’s one key difference between a Gore-tex rain slicker and a satellite-connected cell phone. While the first enables an adventure into remote places, the second threatens to disrupt it. We all know how addicting our phones can be—how they distract us from the present and distance us from the immediate.

In other words, as always, the question isn’t whether MOAR TECHNOLOGY is bad. The question is, how will we interact with it? Will it help us be more resilient or independent or smarter, or less? The worst reason that you come up with to make wifi available in the wild is that it’ll let you keep up with the office, or write Yelp reviews of this section of the river.

It’s helpful to think about the difference between wifi and GPS. Both are radio signals, and both obviously are "technologies.” But the latter helps you establish your physical position more precisely, and can be pretty useful if you get lost; but you’re not very likely to be distracted by your GPS unit, and you can’t use the GPS satellite network to post pictures of yourself.

Mark concludes with this thought:

Maybe, then, what we need is a new preservation movement committed to maintaining some places that are offline. We need to make a societal choice to leave big, open areas totally disconnected. In the end, keeping the wild free from telecommunications will rely on the same idea that has always guided preservation: We have to exercise collective restraint because we know we’re not very good at personal discipline.

From the preface to Richard Gabriel’s book Patterns in Software [pdf]:

In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, “Of course not, that isn’t what I am trying to do. . . . I could never do that.”

Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: “That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect of my students.”

Gradually, I show the students that they have a right to ask this of themselves, and must ask this of themselves. Once that level of standard is in their minds, they will be able to figure out, for themselves, how to do better, how to make something that is as profound as that.

Two things emanate from this changed standard. First, the work becomes more fun. It is deeper, it never gets tiresome or boring, because one can never really attain this standard. One’s work becomes a lifelong work, and one keeps trying and trying. So it becomes very fulfilling, to live in the light of a goal like this.

But secondly, it does change what people are trying to do. It takes away from them the everyday, lower-level aspiration that is purely technical in nature, (and which we have come to accept) and replaces it with something deep, which will make a real difference to all of us that inhabit the earth.